Saturday, May 24, 2008

I have previously blogged about Microsoft Live Book Search which is similar toGoogle Book Search but was scanning/digitizing different books and approaching with a slightly different permission procedure. Microsoft has now announced that they will be stopping this service. Cf. articles in NYTimes or from AP. The business perspective on this is all about Google vs. Microsoft, but from those in biblical studies, it is a blow to the online books that will be available. According to the AP article, Microsoft "said it will give publishers digital copies of the 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles it has amassed." What does this mean for those books you have searched and used on Microsoft's site? Again from the AP, "Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites."

The related issue here is that Microsoft is dropping support for the Internet Archive which hosts a ton of other resources I regularly use. The Internet Archive has resources to go on "for a while," but it would be a shame if this site went down too.